I enjoyed Frank's What's the Matter With America? (as it was called on UK publication), but one thing that consisently struck me was that, Frank's critique of present Demo-goguery notwithstanding, he retained a rather bleary-eyed view of liberalism past (which once, apparently, stood for "equality and economic security").

Without this mythologising, the book would have to have been called Why Aren't You Voting Nader?. In his latest interview for In These Times magazine, he takes this one step further, to the point of utter logical confusion. For instance, here is he in the Democrats:

I think the values of the left still have power. But something has become apparent to me since I moved to Washington, D.C. [from Chicago]. There is this aversion, bordering on hatred, for the left, especially among Democrats. People who dominate discussions in Democratic circles despise the left, and there is no way in hell they are going to embrace the values of the left. You can try to explain to them how they need to do it for strategic purposes or in order to win elections, [but] it doesn’t matter. The Democratic centrists got their way [in the 2004 presidential election], they got their candidate, they got their way on everything, and they still lost. And who gets the blame? It’s going to be the left.

This is virtually unexceptionable and, one would think, instructive. Yet:

So how do Democrats make the argument?

They just have to bite the bullet and try it. We’ve got to do something new. But they’re not going to do anything unless they’re pushed, unless there are forces on the ground making them do something. And it’s our job to stir up those forces.

...

What’s your next project?

I think I’m going to write about what the Democrats have to do. Don’t you think that’s the thing?

The Democrats will never do whatever it is that Frank thinks they ought to do, because they have utter contempt for the left, yet 'the thing' is to write about what Democrats ought to do? This is where an analysis of the Democratic Party would have been invaluable. It is conceivable that the Democratic Party, pressured from without, will be coaxed into altering its rhetoric, offering a few useful reforms, defending those it has itself initiated etc. It is inconceivable that it will become the kind of organisation, the kind of tool, that can deliver a socially just settlement or put an end to imperial misadventure.

How many times does it need demonstrating? At the zenith of liberal reforms, the New Deal delivered some benefits and union protection, but failed to stop mass unemployment. Roosevelt, the most liberal of Democrat presidents, nevertheless contrived to provoke a conflagration with the Japanese and thus inaugurated the global - as opposed to merely regional - American empire: hence the imperial acronym, FDR. From that point, it is all entirely downhill. In the postwar era, Democrat presidencies have been among the most reactionary and imperialist, and the end of it all was the oleaginous Bill Clinton surreptitiously attacking gays, playing with subliminal racism over Ricky Ray Rector, slashing welfare, bombing the Balkans and the Middle East, allowing his economic policy to be dictated by Wall Street and sacraficing American labour on the altar of free trade.

The 'thing', surely, is to think about what the Left must do, how it must use its resources and continuing strengths in this period. The significance of Frank's book is, among other things, the way in which it maps the struggle for ideological hegemony. The Left defangs itself in that struggle by attaching its hopes to the coterie of charlatans and morally bankrupt, rich blueboys that lead the Democratic Party. With Bush's eyes fixed somewhere above and beyond the firmament, there is every opportunity to belt him severely in the fundament.